More articles by Jeremy Jones

Author Bio

Jeremy Jones is a Quality Assurance Engineer at The Weather Channel. He's responsible for writing, maintaining, and extending an automated test framework for their TV broadcast software. He has six years of experience in the EDI industry working for Harbinger/Peregrine/Inovis. He considers his daughter Zane, his son Justus, and that his wife, Debra, still stays with him after eight years of marriage his three greatest accomplishments. He's also an open source software author (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/munkware). All views and opinions expressed in this article are those of Jeremy Jones and not of The Weather Channel.

You don't have to rely on expensive and proprietary EDI conversion software to parse, validate, and translate EDI X12 data to and from XML; you can build your own translator with any modern programming language, such as Python.

EDI doesn't have to be ripped out at the roots from every location and business currently using it, but long-term, EDI lacks the general-purpose data format capability that data exchange requires, so companies that rely on electronic data interchange are slowly but surely adopting XML insteadand rightly so, despite some problems.